What I liked best about the Azar books was the clarity of their explanations, the exercises which comprised one coherent text and those which called on the students to use the current grammar point to talk about their own lives. Even now, in my college classes for native speakers, I use an Azar-type exercise when teaching about modal verbs: I ask the students to write 15 sentences about their real lives using modal verbs, then to explain which modal meaning is active in the sentence. For instance, one might write "I can't party this weekend, because I have to write a paper." "Can't" here has to do with permission and obligation rather than ability. There were a lot of exercises in Azar involving less context and no application to the students' own experiences -- usually more of these than of the type I liked. So I would emphasize the type I liked. Rote exercises are of much more use to people learning a new language (how about ENL -- "English as a new language"!). Such learners usually have more tolerance for them, as well, because they know they need practice to make their usage automatic. I lived in Germany for two years, and perfected my noun-phrase agreement by rehearsing noun phrases in my head while riding the bus to and fro on my daily commute. Teaching grammar to native speakers is a quite different matter. This is a fraught scenario, because native speakers already speak (a variety of) English. As researchers in foreign-language learning have found out, "affect", or emotional factors in learning, is crucial in motivation to learn. Unfortunately, the prescriptive mindset found in today's K-12 teaching materials is in complete discord with these findings. Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: [log in to unmask] Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/